


Redacted

by veleda_k



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cold War, F/F, Kissing, Longing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 13:21:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7053388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veleda_k/pseuds/veleda_k
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four kisses that never made it into any mission report.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redacted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilacsigil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/gifts).



“I still intend to arrest you, I'll have you know.”

“Aw, Peg, saving your life doesn't get me a pass?”

“You didn't save my life,” Peggy corrected Dottie with all the indignation she could muster. “You saved me time. I would have escaped on my own. I will grant you that you enabled me to do so more quickly.”

Dottie's smirk was more eloquent than any words would have been. “I've cleared the top three floors. We can exit via the roof. You did bring a rappel line, didn't you?”

Peggy snorted. “Of course I've brought a rappel line. Try to kill me if you wish, but don't condescend to me.” 

“Sorry, darling.”

Peggy's brain shorted for a second. “Never call me that again.”

Dottie's smirk grew even more insufferable. 

Peggy firmly fixed her mind on the task at hand. “Not that I wouldn't rather be alive than dead,” she said softly as they crept through the building, occasionally stepping over the Chinese agents who had had the misfortune of meeting Dottie, “but why are you helping me? I would think you'd cheer to see me killed by Communists.”

Dottie fixed Peggy with a withering look. “Chinese Communists. They never properly understood the workers' revolution, and they refuse to move with the times.” She stopped, and placed her hand very gently on Peggy's own. “Peggy, someday I may strangle the life out of you, but I would never allow Chinese communists to kill you.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“Roof,” Dottie announced. She went first, and Peggy wondered what it meant that Dottie was willing to have Peggy at her back. A display of confidence? An assertion that even if Peggy tried to attack Dottie from behind, she would still fail. Or a strange statement of trust?

Dottie turned to Peggy and grinned. “I'll go down the southeast corner, and you'll go down the northwest? Or the other way around.”

Peggy narrowed her eyed. “I told you I was going to take you in.”

Peggy had forgotten just how fast Dottie was. In a flash, she'd moved herself far too close to Peggy. Peggy steadied herself to throw a punch, but instead Dottie kissed her. _Oh dear_ , was Peggy's first thought. But the expected soporific effect was absent. It was just Dottie's lips on hers. For a second, Peggy kissed back. But only for a second. Then she came to her senses, pulled away, and glared fiercely.

Dottie was smiling far more beatifically than she had any right to. “I did save you life.”

Which was true, not that Peggy intended to admit it. Mostly, Peggy realized she was in danger of missing her rendezvous point. She had already had to argue for this mission. (Howard and a number of others felt that the Co-Director's place was not in the field.) Making her team worry would just be an extra headache.

“I won't let you off so easily next time.” Peggy did her best to make it sound like more than an empty threat.

“Oh, Peggy,” Dottie said in a way that did something strange to Peggy's skin, “I'm counting on it.”

Then she was gone. 

Peggy's lips were still tingling. When she returned to base she would have to, very discreetly, test herself for dangerous substances.

_____

“When this is over, I am going to arrest you. Twice.”

Dottie gave Peggy an exasperatingly sweet look. “After all that trouble you went to to save my life? Which was very daring, I should add. Very heroic and dashing.”

“Just because I don't want you dead, does not mean I want you walking free.”

“If these excitable boys get their way, neither of us will have to worry about that.”

“Good thing I don't intend to let them have their way,” Peggy said as she fired of a shot. They were boys. A bunch of stupid boys who thought they had found a shortcut to power.

About a year ago, a rumor surfaced that a piece of the Tesseract had broken off in the ocean and had literally resurfaced. Peggy didn't believe a word of it. The cube wouldn't be what it was (whatever that was, exactly) if it could fall to pieces so easily, but SHIELD had to investigate.

Which led her to her current predicament, in East Germany without proper clearance, rescuing Dottie Underwood, and making sure a second Hydra didn't rise. 

“You don't really think we're going to find a Tesseract?” Peggy asked.

A man rushed at Dottie, and she broke his neck in a smooth, graceful motion. “Of course not. But like you, I had to at least check.”

“What would you do with a Tesseract?” Peggy raised her voice to be heard over the gunfire. “If I even want to know the answer.”

Dottie managed to rip a man's gun from his hands and shoot him with it while simultaneously shrugging. Peggy was impressed despite herself. “I hadn't thought that far ahead. But if it's there, I want it.”

Peggy snorted. “I should have known.”

“Right, Peggy Carter, the great, selfless defender of the free world. She kills the commies and makes the earth safe for capitalism.”

“I'm not debating politics with you.” Anything else Peggy might have said was set aside for later as she kicked the final door in. “Hands in the air! I'm with SHIELD, and I'm ordering you to stand down.”

“I'm not with SHIELD,” Dottie added. “I'm just here to look at your new toy.”

Peggy glared at her. “Surrender peacefully and you won't be harmed.”

To Peggy's lack of surprise, they did not surrender peacefully. Some people thought that fighting to the last man was noble. In Peggy's experience it was just more dead bodies. 

Dottie reached the supposed Tesseract before Peggy did. If the thing was real, she was going to have a hell of a fight on her hand, one that she was far from certain she'd win.

Dottie sighed. “Glass.” She tossed it aside, and it shattered prettily. She eyed Peggy thoughtfully. “What would you have done if they had surrendered to you? You don't have the manpower to have actually taken them prisoner, and you certainly couldn't have trusted them to be good boys.” Her eyes glinted. “You never intended to let them live. Oh, Peg, that's gorgeous,” she breathed.

“I knew they wouldn't surrender,” Peggy said stiffly. 

“Peggy Carter, defender of the free world,” Dottie repeated with mockery.

“I won't be ridiculed by some twisted, amoral mercenary,” Peggy bit out. “Consider my loyalties less than perfect, fine, but at least I have them.”

The look Dottie gave her made Peggy think she might just try to kill Peggy then and there. Then a great heaviness came over her. “If I had a Tesseract, they would have wanted me back. I don't think I could go back, after all this time, but they would have wanted me again.”

What Peggy did next was mad recklessness, but that was what she was known for. “Turn yourself in. Make a deal. The United States has bargained with monsters far worse than you.” She paused, then forged ahead. “I'd vouch for you.”

Dottie looked at her for a very long time, her expression inscrutable. Then she smiled and stood very close to Peggy. Adrenaline raced through Peggy as Dottie kissed her very softly. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then she landed a punch to Peggy's solar plexus that knocked Peggy off her feet and stole the breath from her body. By the time she was able to stand, Dottie was gone.

_____

 

Peggy was nursing a tonic water when Dottie sat down beside her in the hotel bar. “You,” Peggy said with certainty, “are not my contact.”

“No,” Dottie agreed smoothly. “Your contact was going to sell you out. I killed him for you.”  
“Out of the goodness of your heart. Because you just happened to be passing through,” Peggy said disbelievingly. 

“Well, I thought I deserved a vacation, and Cuba is so lovely this time of you. Then, I thought, 'Why not drop in on my good friend Peggy Carter, or whatever you're calling yourself here.' No need to thank me for killing the double agent.”

Peggy huffed. “Thank you? Now I'll never find out what he knew.” It occurred to her that that may have been Dottie's reasoning precisely. “Anyway, you've dropped in, as you put it, and now you can go.”

“But we have so much catching up to do! I just discovered that you were going to blow up the moon.”

Peggy choked on her tonic water. “First of all, that is top secret. I'm not going to ask how you found that out, but I will ask you not to go blurting that sort of thing out. Second, no one intended to actually blow up the moon. They were simply discussing deploying a nuclear device. And, third, _we_ were going to do no such thing. I'm British, and that was all American tomfoolery.”

“You have dual citizenship, Peggy, and SHIELD is American in all but technicality. You were going to blow up the moon.”

Peggy rolled her eyes. “At least we never built a nuclear bomb so large, it needed another nuclear bomb to detonate it.”

Dottie crossed her arms. “The Tsar Bomba was a marvel of Soviet ingenuity. And you're not supposed to know about it.” Her voice sounded almost petulant.

Peggy had never been the sort of careless layabout who would drink on a mission. But this was Dottie Underwood. “Bourbon, please!” she called out to the bartender.

“I'll have the same,” Dottie said, pleasant again. “And put it on my tab.”

Peggy waited until she had had a long drink of bourbon before speaking again. “I am done spilling state secrets in public,” she hissed. Dear god, what had she been thinking. She should have maintained dignified silence from the start. This was what Dottie did to her. 

Dottie sipped her bourbon. “Are you sure you wouldn't rather have a martini?” she asked. “Shaken not stirred?”

Peggy stared at her. “You cannot tell me you enjoy James Bond films.”

“Enjoy them? Of course not. They're everything that's wrong with the West. Self-congratulatory and brutish, a bunch of boys dressed up like men who can't see women as anything but the help or sex kittens.”

Peggy snorted. “You're telling me there's no gender prejudice in the Motherland?”

“Things are better. Communism knows a woman's place is in the revolution.”

Peggy shook her head. “I'm not sure I believe things are better anywhere.”

Dottie gave a gentle tilt of her head and took another drink of bourbon. Then she smiled in a tension breaking way. “I'd be your Bond girl, you know. The sexy double agent one.” 

“Doesn't Bond kill those girls in the end?” That was not the proper response to such a statement, but the proper response wasn't making it passed Peggy's lips.

“I'd make a daring escape. Come back in the next film.”

Peggy felt like she had somehow stepped out of her world and into another, one of those parallel universes Howard was always going on about. A world in which a different Peggy Carter was leading a different life. In this life, it was normal to flirt with Dottie over drinks, and a little later they'd go back to Peggy's room and do much more than flirt. 

The Peggy in that world was probably very happy. But this was the only world Peggy had, and in this world she was director of SHIELD, and Dottie was very much not SHIELD. She was married, and Dottie was very much not Daniel. 

“If my contact isn't going to show, then I should go.” Peggy stood. But maybe that other Peggy was still in the room, just a little, because she leaned down and kissed Dottie briefly, a mere brush of lips. “Next time, Bond girl, I really am going to arrest you.”

Dottie smiled at her with actual affection. “Until next time, 007.”

\----

 

The place smelled wrong. Dottie had waded through blood soaked battlegrounds, rotting corpses, with their guts hanging out and reeking. The smell of this place, must covered in antiseptic, was worse than that. The walls were painted in colors that were probably meant to be soothing, and instead came of as drab. It was a dead place. 

“Hey, Peg.” Dottie felt her bones creak as she sat down besides Peggy's bed. “It's pretty rude of you to be asleep when I come by to visit you. What happened to British politeness? Oh, right, dual citizenship.

“Looks like I'm going to outlive you, unless I get hit by bus out there. I guess this means I win, or something.” She sighed. “But that was never our competition.

“God, I miss the Cold War. And not just because I didn't have to worry about breaking a hip. We had some good times, didn't we?

“I should have kissed you more. Real, proper kisses. And I should have taken you to bed properly. Now the only thing I'm taking to bed is a hot water bottle.

“We did okay, though. You kept the world safe for democracy or whatever it was you were trying to do, and I… I survived. Quite well.”

Dottie paused and held her breath as Peggy's eyelids fluttered open. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my room?” She sounded sterner than her delicate appearance would suggest.

“It's me, Peggy, Dottie. Dottie Underwood.” There had been another name, once upon a time, but that was the only one that mattered anymore.

Peggy's eyes on Dottie were as piercing as they'd ever been. “Dottie? What the hell are you wearing?”

Dottie grinned knowingly. “It's a disguise, Peg. No one ever suspects an old lady.” That much was true.

“I should arrest you.” Peggy yawned. “If only I weren't so tired.” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Did you kiss me wearing that lipstick?”

Dottie smiled and shook her head. “No, but I'm kissing you now.” She pressed her lips to Peggy's and let the kiss linger.

Peggy's shook her head as Dottie pulled away. “You're incorrigible.” Whatever she was going to say next was lost as she fell asleep again.

Dottie stood up, ignoring the discomfort in her joints. Not for the first time, she wished that Leviathan had managed to recreate the Super Solider formula.

On her way out, she ran into a fresh faced, young blonde woman. “Oh,” the woman said pleasantly, “I didn't know Aunt Peggy had a visitor.”

“She's asleep,” Dottie said. “I was just on my way out.”

“I'm Sharon.” The young woman held out her hand, and Dottie took it. “Can I ask how you knew Aunt Peggy? Or is it classified?” Sharon smiled as she said it, but Dottie got the feeling Sharon knew full well that plenty of Peggy’s work was indeed still classified.

“We met after the war,” Dottie said. “Ran into each other now and again. She… she was my best friend.”

“I'm so sorry.” Sharon laid a comforting hand on Dottie's hand, which Dottie endured no longer than propriety required. 

“I should go,” Dottie said. “I'm a tired old woman myself.” She wasn't tired, but she wasn't interested in making nice with niece Sharon.

Once outside, Dottie sat down on a bench. She was a bit tired after all. Besides, it was a nice day, and who knew how many more of those Dottie was going to see?

Dottie leaned back into the sun, pressed her wrinkled fingers to her dry lips, and felt young again.


End file.
